Earlier this year VisionArc was invited to participate in the BMW Guggenheim Lab in New York City.
On September 7th, VisionArc director Landon Brown presented a talk and public workshop entitled Confronting Comfort: Visual Systems. In the talk Landon spoke on how, today, conventional definitions of comfort as an individual measure are being upended by unseen risks in the shared systems that our social and personal comfort-ability depends upon.
As a stepping-off point, the talk explored the notion of visual language as an index to some of the shared systems that we encounter throughout our day-to-day lives in the city. The initial discussion about “hard systems” like mass transit and energy networks transitioned to those “soft systems” found in even the most mundane of routines like going to the laundromat or the corner deli. Ultimately, the “making visible” of the intersections between these systems was shown to represent opportunities for developing resilience in even the most varied of urban contexts.
In a concluding workshop/open forum, Landon, along with participants from the audience, discussed ways in which the re-purposing of familiar parts of New York City’s social, infrastructural and commercial landscape might offer a glimpse into future solutions for confronting shared risk at the urban scale.
See some visual excerpts from the talk in the slideshow above.
About the BMW Guggenheim Lab:
“The BMW Guggenheim Lab is a mobile laboratory traveling to nine major cities worldwide over six years. Led by international, interdisciplinary teams of emerging talents in the areas of urbanism, architecture, art, design, science, technology, education, and sustainability, the Lab addresses issues of contemporary urban life through programs and public discourse. Over the Lab’s six-year migration, there will be three distinct mobile structures and thematic cycles. Each structure will be designed by a different architect, and each will travel to three cities around the globe. The theme of the Lab’s first two-year cycle is Confronting Comfort—exploring notions of individual and collective comfort and the urgent need for environmental and social responsibility.”
A calendar of other events and happenings at the Lab can be found here.